The Evolution of Social Media Monitoring: A Vertical Approach to Listening

We've had a number of posts on our blog speak to the importance of social media monitoring in strategy creation, including a recent addition that highlights the need for improvements to technological platforms to better inform those strategies. Now, it appears as if some of those much-needed improvements are making their way into the world of social media monitoring tools, and via the wine industry no less.

Mashable writes about the rising success of Cruvee, a social media monitoring platform that specializes in identifying, decoding, and understanding online interactions in the wine industry. Currently, about 27% of all wineries in the US are using the service to inform them of their brand's conversations online, among other cool features the program has incorporated into their service such as monetizing Facebook pages by giving the user the ability to turn their page into a virtual storefront, complete with a "buy now" button.

But the most interesting aspect of Cruvee's service is that it addresses a number of issues currently facing users of other social media monitoring platforms. Cruvee has built-in solutions that aim to minimize the "clutter" associated with finding where your brand lives in online conversations. Think of it as a platform that allows your brand to focus on the strategy that results from conversation analysis, rather than the time-consuming process of receiving those results. Here are a few of the things the Cruvee model offers that should be incorporated into other platforms:

1. Comprehension of industry "jargon". By focusing on one industry, the platform has built-in identifiers for language that other platforms often do not pick up. For example, someone tweeting the about the great "cab sauv" they enjoyed is picked up by the platform and shows up in the conversation dashboard results, where in many instances they may not. By searching for language that influencers within industry actually use (including shorthand, as in the above reference), the result is a clearer picture of what is actually being said.

2. Elimination of the hassles of tracking sentiment. While Cruvee achieves this better than most through its wine-specific algorithm, the possibilities to improve exist. Through the creation of additional industry-specific algorithms that take into account the type of language used in a given industry's online conversations, confusion brought on by jargon, and possibly, sarcasm, might be greatly lessened. Mashable gives the example of the automotive industry and a commenters leaving a post about some "sick rims" and how easy it is for current platforms to miss the compliment.

3. Fast-track the process of identifying influencers. An interesting part of Cruvee's model is that it has decided for the user which digital influencers (as a starting point) should be tracked and then allows for customizable keywords within that ecosystem. This approach alleviates the pains of searching within a core set of influencers, and then allows for sharper focus on your brand through the insights gained by additional keyword selection.

4. Direct comparison to competitors. Since Cruvee operates in a set digital ecosystem that can be customized, the ability is there for users to find out how their competition is faring in relation to them using the same set of criteria. Cruvee currently allows their users to view some historical data on rival brands, but one can imagine the possibilities such a platform might produce in the future in terms of real-time tracking of brands, side-by-side in a "live" digital ecosystem.

It will be interesting to watch this space to see where social media monitoring goes from here. There are definitely advantages to be had in a vertical approach to listening, and they appear they might help solve some of the current issues facing the tech side of the equation. The importance of a highly trained staff of social media mavens that can identify and analyze conversations around your brand is always your best bet, however, with advances in the platforms for doing so, we may find ourselves being able to spend more time building a winning social media strategy and less time collecting the required data to do so.